This is the 8th installment in the rather long series that
started with Part 1 about a month ago.

Back in 2006, we were in the situation where MySQL 5.0 had taken
forever, and the first “GA” release was not suitable for
production. Looking towards MySQL 5.1, it was also unlikely to be
out any time soon. The MySQL Cluster team had customers that
needed new features in a stable release. The …

While Oracle deserves some praise for its donation of
OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, it is disappointing
again to see a legitimate open source market contender that has
been marginalized by miscommunication and mismanagement of the
project by a large vendor.

OpenOffice.org, warts and all, was probably the most significant
competition for Microsoft Office for years and in many ways
demonstrated the advantages of open source, helping usher in
wider use of it, as well as greater usability. OO.o was in fact
my reason for originally investigating and moving to open source
software more than a decade ago. Regardless of …

There is much excitement this week (understandably) about the
formation of the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice fork of
Openoffice.org.

Alan Bell sees correlation with the previous fork of Joomla from
Mambo and has illustrated the potential impact that forking a
project can have with a Google Trends chart, where Mambo is the
blue line, and Joomla is the red line:

A similar chart for Debian (blue) and Ubuntu (red) is also
instructive:
…

Before I even start this post I am going to repeat our view that Oracle is well aware that
it has little to gain from killing off MySQL and that we expect
MySQL to become the scale-out database for non-transactional web
applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental
deployments.

That said there has been some interesting discussion on Twitter
this week in response to the European Commission’s investigation
of Oracle-Sun about whether Oracle could - in theory - kill off
MySQL. Here’s a Q+A explaining my …

At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big
corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of
examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies.
Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun,
only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are more open
questions than ever and at least three versions of MySQL that are
jockeying to continue the MySQL blood-line. Yesterday I attended
talks by two of these groups and I have to …

Note: these are live notes. It was a great talk, I’d
rate it as excellent (and I’m not just saying that because Josh
and I work in the same group at Sun). I’ll have to also comment
on his thoughts and talk, in due time. MySQL, as an open source
project, has a lot to learn.

Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
A How-To GuideJosh Berkus, Community Guy

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